[AdamTheCamper]

I believe it is quite close to the metal. When I had my Systems Programming course in first year of college we started with C, and then continued with x86 assembly. One of interesting parts was, when we compiled our C code to assembly and then compared with our hand-written assembly code. Was fun :)

[cheatercheater]

Do you realize that with pipelining, preemptive computation, multiple levels of caching, opcode optimization, NUMA, massive parallelism, and all that other stuff x86 is to hardware what Java is to hardware interrupts?

Answer: you don't because otherwise you would not have posted the above.

[Androsynth]

You're over exaggerating. You can teach students about processor theory, assembly language and C without getting into all the extra stuff.

All the extra stuff is built on that foundation, and learning C helps you understand that foundation better than any other language.

[cheatercheater]

This is not "extra stuff". It is how it works. x86 was made to be simple to hand-code, not to in any way reflect the hardware. And then, decades later, new developments to it are so that it's easy to compile to. The language went through two major paradigms without either having the point of x86 reflecting the hardware it abstracts. SIMD, NUMA, pipelining and caching is exactly how processors work right now. And they're radically different to what happened before the Intel Core family of processors. This is in turn radically different to what happened before the Pentium Pro family of processors. Yet all support the same x86 instruction set. The corollary is that x86 is an abstraction. You're being ignorant if you think x86 is like the opcodes being executed after the whole caching stage has happened.